You Don’t Need to Tell Me I’m Fat

 

Of course I’m overweight.  I don’t need my family to tell me that or my friends or even my doctor.  Every time I look in the mirror, I see an old fat man looking back at me.  You wish I wasn’t fat?  I wish I wasn’t old.  Although I have always been large, I have noticed it has become more of a problem in recent years.  Part of that is that I am older and losing weight is more of a problem the older one gets.  I remember when I was in my prime that I went on a severe diet and lost 60 or 70 pounds.  In fact, I did that on two separate occasions.  The weight loss was nice but the change in my overall personality was rather dangerous, even to my health.  Both times I put it all back on, plus some. 

I am heavier today that I have ever been.  I know it’s not good for my health.  My doctor will suggest in a very kind way (not judgmental at all) that for my own good I need to lose some weight.  Weight loss is a pretty simple formula—on paper.  I could share my “severe diet” but it’s something I really don’t recommend.  I understand the formula, burn more calories than you take in.  Usually that simply means reducing the amount of intake and increase the amount of physical activity.  I explained to an interested party that about the only exercise left to me today is walking.  “Then, you need to walk,” said the listener.  “I can’t walk,” I explained, further telling that I shuffle rather than walk and I do that with the aid of a cane and sometimes a walker.  I’ve gone to my doctor with such leg problems that he has offered to have someone take me back to my car in a wheelchair.  I declined the offer.

Would I like to be a hundred pounds lighter?  You bet.  Will that happen?  A few months ago I would have told you that was so unthinkable that I would not even want to speak of it.  Something has happened since then I can’t explain.  My walking became a little easier.  The pain in my legs and elsewhere diminished.  It didn’t go completely away, but it was better.  The pain in the knees became almost irrelevant to my overall functioning.  I felt better, walked better and was able to be more active.  I was able to walk a block and then a few blocks and eventually got up to a half a mile and then a mile.  I was able to get around outside doing things I had only thought of for the past few years.  I uncovered my old 1966 Mustang, put in a new battery and got it started.  I worked on the engine.  Crawling under the car, something I would not have attempted earlier, I was able to drain the gasoline from the tank to put fresher fuel.  I was able to remove the wheels and work on the brakes.  That involved getting down on the floor, lifting, squatting and stretching.  I was frankly amazed that I was able to do as much as I did and still get back up.

After a few months’ improvements, I went to the doctor for a scheduled exam.  My blood pressure was perfect, the cholesterol and triglycerides were improved from the previous six months and were near perfect, the blood sugar was perfect and I had lost nine pounds.  I believe he was feeling pretty good about his doctoring skills and then I explained that I had started taking Flax Seed Oil and that I credited the improvements to that.  He didn’t argue with me and told me to keep it up.

I don’t know that that is the reason I am doing better, nor do I know of anything else which could be responsible.  Right now, I feel better than I have in years.  My legs still get tired and over a day’s time they start hurting and the walking becomes difficult again.  Sometimes I even have to get out the cane for added strength and stability.  Yes, I have a lot of problems and I am sure it’s because I am fat.

I’ve always been fat.  I know because I was told often as a youngster, not by other kids but by a teacher.  I remember one time when I was about in the seventh or maybe the eighth grade we were looking at our science books at body types.  There were three line drawings of body types, depicting a skinny boy, a moderately larger boy and a much larger, obese boy.  I had a teacher who enjoyed putting me down, trying to make me feel less about myself.  He never failed to remind that I wasn’t much of an athlete (which I wasn’t) and tried to humiliate me whenever he could.

I remember a time when he was reviewing words with us and brought up the word “flammable”, giving its definition.  I asked what “inflammable” meant and he told me (and the class) there was no such word and that if there was it would mean “not able to burn.”  I told him that I was pretty sure I had seen it on the back of a gasoline tanker and he got a good laugh out of that, telling me I was imagining it.  Sometime later we were on a school bus on an outing that took us through town.  There in front of our bus was a small gasoline tanker with the word “inflammable” painted in large letters across the back.  All the kids saw it and pointed it out, explaining that was exactly what Hershel had said.  I didn’t say anything.  I was afraid of the man who had a history of what I perceived to be violence toward children—something tolerated and even encouraged back in those days.  That was why I never looked it up in a dictionary to prove him wrong.  Of course, today takes little effort to learn that “flammable” means “easily set on fire,” and “inflammable” means “easily set on fire.”

Ours was a small rural school which only went through the eighth grade.  We had only three teachers and he was one of them, serving as both a teacher and the principal.  Looking back on that school, we probably got just as good an education as anyone else, including our counterparts in town attending larger schools.  I think socially many of us were underdeveloped.  Years later, when I was no longer afraid of him and was not a threat to his children (and I came to view him as an equal—if not an underling), I asked him if they ever thought of the social difficulties we had when we left there and went into town to larger schools.  He said they understood it at the time but they didn’t know what to do about it.

Back to the line drawings of the body types—for some reason the teacher signaled me out for a question.  “Hershel,” he asked, “which one of those do you think you look like?”  I knew I wasn’t the skinny kid, but neither did I feel I was the obese.  “The middle one, I guess,” I answered.  He didn’t just snicker at the answer, it provoked a giant and hearty belly-laugh, accompanied with, “You might have been but you’re sure not now.”  And I sank a little lower in the desk.

I wish I had jumped up and said, “Why you g _ _  d _ _ _ ed, m _ _ _ _ _ f _ _ _ _ _ _ s _ _ of a b _ _ _ _, I’m in the eighth grade, I’m 5’ 6” tall and weigh less than a hundred pounds.  We can’t all be anorexic like your entire family.”  They were the kinds of people who could have eaten lard for every meal and never put on a pound.  His daughter was in my grade and he always wanted her to be the smartest person in class.  They worked at it.  Every year we would take achievement tests and I always beat her until our final year when she won first place and I won second.  (It really didn’t matter to me but my mother was always suspicious of those test results.)  I didn’t say all that to him because I didn’t have such a fine vocabulary back then, and I was afraid of him, and I was more afraid of my dad.

Looking back on those times, I was made to feel very poor about myself and it affected me in nearly every facet of my life.  He singlehandedly made me feel I was fat and that was treated as a moral failing.  We had an invitational basketball tournament at that school called the “PeeWee Tournament.”  To play in that tournament boys had to be less than one hundred pounds and the girls had to weigh less than ninety pounds.  I played in that tournament all the way through the eighth grade.  I do not think a kid standing 5’ 6”, weighing less than 100 pounds can be considered obese.  I would speculate that a hundred pounds would only look obese on a two year old.  I further recall being in the ninth grade when John Kennedy was President and we were subject to considerable physical fitness testing.  Only because of that event do I remember that I measured 5’ 9” tall and weighed 125 pounds.  That’s not obese either.  When I graduated high school, I stood 5’ 11” tall and weighed 165 pounds.  Neither is that obese.

I saw some bullies when I was a kid, but the only bullies I ever had attack me personally were school teachers.  Thank goodness they were the exception or I might never have completed school and gone on to college to earn degrees including a Master’s in Education and a Juris Doctorate.

Given all that, today I know that I am obese.  Medical terminology says I am “morbidly obese,” a term I would think they would have changed by now.  But, I lost nine pounds by not even trying.  Perhaps I will try this time.  Maybe I can lose twelve pounds by the next six month exam.  If I don’t try to lose 60 or 70 pounds in four months, perhaps I can lose it and keep it off this time.  Yes, I know my health would be far better off.  But, I still refuse to think it is a moral issue.

You Ever See a Dead Guy?

 

“Did you ever see a dead guy?”  This was the question a guest asked David Letterman on his late night show.  “Sure,” answered David, “I’ve seen thousands of them at funerals.”  Of course, that was not what the guest had in mind.  He wanted to know if he had ever seen a dead guy in the raw—a dead guy somewhere where you aren’t supposed to see dead people.

Most of us have seen death, not staring us in the face, but laid out before us like a work of art to view with others, something like walking through a crowded art museum.  If the funeral defines our experience with death, we know little about its ugly side.  Regardless of how much we grieve, we get together with people sharing our loss and loss, remember the good times and the bad, and tell stories over and over again that bring joys and tears at the same time.  We eat and drink with family and friends while reminiscing about the past to which this person has now been committed.  We go into a house of worship and listen to a professional mourner talk about this person and then we go to look at him or her and marvel at how good they look.  We may even break down and cry over the coffin, but the pain and all the bad memories will someday be forgotten, or at least diminished, and we will remember only the good.  If that is what you have seen, a sanitized version of death, you have never seen a dead guy.

Have you ever helped pull a dead body from a car wreck?  It’s not a pleasant sight to see how badly the body can be broken.  Seeing a man lying in a house with a shotgun wound to his chest, his eyes vacantly pointing unfocused at a spot unknown, is death in the raw.  He is a stranger and so is his wife who is in the other room crying for what she has done.  You don’t know either of them or what brought on this tragedy.  There is no food and drink.  There are no sad or happy stories, no laughing and no crying.  There are no mourners.  There may later be a grieving mother or a grieving father, a sister or a brother lost in their not knowing how it is that this vital young man is suddenly gone.  There is nothing you can do.  As you walk through the room your eyes suddenly come into the space where the dead man’s dead eyes seem to be looking and you see not the dead man but catch a glimpse of death itself.  It can be ugly and hideous. 

You ever see a dead guy?  Yes.  As a youngster, perhaps 10 years old or so, my cousin and I were riding bicycles in a suburb of Oklahoma City.  A loud roar went overhead and crashed in the yard next to us.  He and I, as you would expect of any young boys, hurried over to have a front row seat.  Our youthful curiosity led us into a sobering scene of destruction and death, a place where small children should not venture.  I had always been fascinated with airplanes.  A youthful encounter with those amazing flying machines had opened vistas rarely imagined by one whose feet are firmly placed on the solid footing of mother earth.  But, there I stood looking at twisted metal, hardly recognizable for what it had been only a few seconds earlier.  Something dropping from the sky seldom holds its original form.  And the devastation of the done to the twisted metal paled to the damage done to the man and the woman who only a few seconds were riding in that machine.  I saw one torso lying by itself near a couple of arms and a leg looking as if they had been surgically severed from a human body.  There was a head nearby.  I couldn’t find the other one.  Most of the bodies were fragments.  They were picked up with tissue and placed in a bag.  All that damage was contained in a small back yard of a small house in a suburb filled with other small houses.  Surely there would someday be memorials and eventually happy memories for the ones left behind.  But, that day I learned that death can be ugly and hideous.

You ever see a dead guy?  Yes.  It came suddenly but realizing what had happened, fully realizing that he was gone was laborious.  I was high school age living with my parents in the country about six miles from the nearest town, about fifteen miles from the nearest hospital.  A car drove up to the house and came to a sudden stop.  Id didn’t know the car but I did know the driver.  He was a kid just a year or  two younger than me, Jackie Brimer.  We had gone to the little country school called Hext.  We were both were from close families that knew the difficulties of eking out a living from the sandy land cotton farms of that region.  He was a good kid.  We were not close friends but we were a little more than simply close acquaintances.  He had been crying and driving all too fast on those poor roads.  He ran to the house and told us his father had passed out and could we call for an ambulance.   And, then, as quickly as he had appeared he was gone, returning from whence he had come.  We made the call and it would take an hour in those days for the ambulance to find their home.  Both my parents kept a large oxygen bottle next to their bed.  They both had heart trouble and when their breathing was labored or when they had severe chest pains, they would lie there breathing in pure oxygen.  We wrestled that bottle into the back seat of my car and drove as fast as we could to the Brimer home.  What we found was a chaotic scene of fear and confusion.  We carried the oxygen bottle inside and put the mask on him just in case he was still breathing.  He wasn’t.  We were pretty certain of that.  He had soiled himself which is not unusual for a person who dies.  He wasn’t moving.  We didn’t know to try to feel a heartbeat in the carotid artery in those days.  We tried to feel a pulse in his wrist.  My father placed his ear near the nostrils of the man to try to detect breathing and I lightly placed my hand on his chest to try to detect the same thing.  His wife was sitting nearby, crying.  She probably knew all our efforts were useless.  There were two small children with her crying because their mother was.  There was a daughter a year or two older than me who was crying hysterically while bathing his face with a damp cloth.  Across the room was an older daughter who had been blind since birth; she hadn’t been taught to be a part of the world.  She had been hidden from sight of the community, her family having been embarrassed by what they had deemed a deformity, and that had resulted in a sightless person somewhat socially insecure.  She was sitting alone.  No one was comforting her; no one was telling her what was going on.  She was more afraid than anyone in that little house.  The ambulance finally arrived and he was taken to the hospital.  There was a general consensus that he was dead, but they put their oxygen on him just in case.  For whoever this man was, for whatever his failings as a husband and father may have been, he loved them in his own way and they loved him.  And he was gone.  And the fear they felt for the uncertain days ahead came before the memories, the recriminations, and the mourning.  Death can be ugly and hideous.

You ever see a dead guy?  Yes.  Too many.

Oklahoma and Red Dirt

 

My daughter came to me after a being asked by a new student from New York why there was so much red dirt here.  She didn’t know the answer and brought the question to me.  Telling her that I guess we were just luck didn’t seem to be enough.  Having done additional research on the subject I can now explain with a little more certainty why there’s so much red dirt around here.

One day God was busy making the world.  It wasn’t that he needed help or anything, but he had Gabriel there just to keep him busy; everyone needs something to do just to stay out of trouble so he had Gabriel running errands.  He had just finished the cornfields of the Midwest and had used more of the rich loam soil than he had originally planned.  He was working his way west of the Mississippi River, laying out the soil like a sweet little child spreading the dirt smooth so he could write his name.  He would smooth it down and then decide to put a little hill here and a little valley there.  He would drag his finger down through some of the valleys, meandering down to another, larger groove in the dirt he had drawn earlier using his full hand.  He would plant the large deciduous forests wherever he wanted them and the pine forests where he thought they were needed.  He had fun making some swamp grasslands down in a peninsula he had stuck on the land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean.  He had had some left over weird animals, hard armor shelled animals with long tails and a long mouth full of wicked teeth and he thought that would be just the place for them.

He worked his way on further west and got all the way to Western Oklahoma when he ran out of dirt.  “Gabriel!” he called.

“Yes, Lord.”

“Do we have any more dirt I can use?”

“We only have some of this red dirt and you know that’s not all that good,” Gabriel replied.  “We’ve run out of the good stuff.  Can it wait until tomorrow when I can get some more loam made?”

“No,” said God.  “I’ll just go ahead and use what we have on hand.  I’m going to make my just a little further west and then I’m going to build me some mountains.  We need to spend our time tonight and tomorrow making some granite for the mountain base and you know how much work it is and how much time it takes to make a mountain.”

“Yes, Lord, I surely do.”

So God took the red dirt and spread it out from here to there, as far as the eye could see.  After it was through it was late at night and he and Gabriel decided they were too tired to build any hills or trench hardly any rivers.  Gabriel had prevailed on him not to make a lot of rivers as the red dirt would just make them muddy anyway.  But, God had felt they need a few of them because he was sure some of the animals might wander into that area and would need to take a drink now and then.

Before turning in for the night, God had decided to plant grass over the dirt he had spread out so smoothly.  He spoke the word and before Gabriel could turn his head there appeared a lush carpet of green reaching all the way from the hills of Texas to the Canadian border and even a little further.  It spread from the forests back east to the edge of the world on the west where he planned on making a great Rocky Mountain range.  God admired the sea of grass and thought it was good and told Gabriel so.  Gabriel, though, was particularly fond of hills, mountains and valleys, running rivers and lakes.  He asked God what kind of people would ever make that kind of place their home.

God said, “Gabriel, there’ll be some people who like this land just for what it is.  They’ll be as strong as a wild animal, so strong in fact that the buffalo and the bear will look at them in awe.  Deep down they’ll have a sweet spirit and when they look at this land where you see nothing they’ll see paradise and they’ll make it their home.”

God and Gabriel walked back to their line shack for the remainder of the night.  They were staying in a line shack as they were not finished with their work and wouldn’t be going home to Heaven before the work was through.  They still needed to prepare some granite for the mountains before they could shut it down for the night and get some sleep.

The grass was a short grass, not requiring a great deal of nutrients and certainly not requiring much water.  The plains had been made so hastily that there were no plans made for the weather system that would provide the amount of rain which would be needed to sustain large, towering trees.  The short grass grew and flourished.  Soon there were small animals, mice and other rodents and even rabbits that came into the grass lands, finding food among the tender leaves and homes deep within the roots.  They were blissfully growing their families.  And when the coyotes and the bobcats heard of those little thriving communities, they made their stealthy march into the grasslands looking for dinner among the mice and the rabbits.

Deer, elk and other large animals found the grass was satisfying and abundant.  They came there, grazing all day and resting during the night.  They were happy and prosperous.  They were grateful for the little rain that did fall and found there was just enough for them to find a little stream, a creek and a small river, here and there where they could quench their thirst.  They ate, they grew and their families grew.  And the wolves and the bears and even the cougars followed them onto the plains. 

Eventually large herds of buffalo came to the plains.  There were no animals so well suited for this short grass.  They ate well, eating their fill, resting up and moving on to another area where the grass is greener.  They roved from place to place eating whatever they could find and they never complained.  There was enough grass to support millions of them in the great herds.  Now and then a wolf would take one of them down, but hardly ever.  They lived without any danger; they had no enemies to speak of as there were just so many of them and they were so large and could be such a formidable enemy.  And then the Indian came along, going where they were, following them where they went.  And the buffalo provided the Indians their food, clothing and shelter.  It was a partnership that worked and the short grass was the base for it all.

Then, one day a box with wheels came onto the plains pulled by two large horses.  The wagon had a sheet of white cloth stretched over hoops attached to the box.  Tied behind the box were a milk cow and a young bull.  That box was stuffed with stuff, homemaking stuff, farming stuff, feed stuff and everything else people needed to survive.  There was a man and a woman sitting on a seat at the front of the box.  They were weathered, their skin was hardened by the sun, and their hair was dry and tangled.  They looked as hard as the buffalo but it appeared they had a tender heart.  They looked to be about in their 60s while in reality they could not have been any more than their mid to late 20s.  They had five children with them.  Two of the children were riding in the back of the box, two were walking along behind while driving four pigs along with the procession, and one was a little thing being held by the woman nursing at her breast.

They stopped their box as if to rest the weary horses and the weary people.  Sitting there, they looked around at the grass; grass as far as the eye could see to the north and the south, to the east and the west.  They sat there just south of one of the few rivers they had seen, the North Fork of the Red, and looked at it all.  They couldn’t see any buffalo that day, but they could see buffalo trails and buffalo wallows.  They saw a deer in the distance.  Mainly they saw the short grass, the green grass from which life seems to spring.  They knew if the mice and the rabbits, the deer and the elk, and the buffalo could live there, so could they.

She asked, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“I’m seeing a paradise,” he replied.

“But, I’ve never seen so much red dirt,” she said.

“I’m seeing a paradise,” he said again.